Culture has a huge part to play in moving a team to high performance and the leader of the team plays a critical role in creating that culture. Sam uses the voices of the diverse scaled agile team he led for 2 years from their entries in his leaving card, and shared how the key themes of their feedback, energy, caring and fun came together to create a culture where team members feel valued, trusted and able to do their best every day regardless of their cultural background or which team or company they work for.

The craft of Agile Coaching fundamentally requires deep, insightful, meaningful communication. In everyday execution, this typically involves a coach and the coachees having a conversation, or dialog. However, there are other ways that an Agile Coach and their coachees can connect – nonverbal communication.

Explore the different aspects of nonverbal communication in the domain of the Agile Coach! This workshop overviews nonverbal communication in Agile Coaching and provides a starting point for developing this critical skill.

What is that magic that makes some teams bubble and fizz whilst others just fizzle out?

Why do some truly soar when others stumble and fail?

In Agile, we talk about nurturing high performing teams, but what is the formula for high performance?

In this session we’ll explore the traits of success and learn some inspiring lessons from a real life Champagne team to help you and your teams find their winning edge!

How can a Scrum Master ensures that the team feels safe and protected? Why building connections within the team is so important? Do we know what is the secret sauce for the magical recipe of high performing teams?

Let’s explore together three activities which can help in building connections within the team.

Agile has become all the rage with corporate leaders. Agile transitioned in the last two decades from something mainly of interest to software developers (and, initially, only a small number of those) to a major concern for CEOs and senior executive teams. Who these days doesn't want their business to be agile?

The Agile mindset is now seen as important for almost every aspect of modern-day business "best practices". Management gurus, strategy journals and every big transformation program all extol user-centric design, rapid iterations for great product management, the importance of omnichannel customer experience and the ability to easily pivot versus multi-year plans and 500-page business cases. Not least, everyone proclaims the virtues of less "top down" hierarchy in structure, diversity and behaviour.

But in that process, have the goals of the Agile movement been co-opted by corporate leaders to align with their traditional agendas? These include maximising shareholder returns, increasing profit margins, reducing headcounts and relentless cost-cutting.

Is any of that a problem for Agile practitioners?

And, if so, what to do about it? What is your "One Metric That Matters"?

Equal Experts works with failing projects and more often than not, it is agile that is blamed as the reason for failure rather than the execution. Although many teams understand the principles of agile, some struggle to see "what good looks like" when they haven't experienced it before.

The Ball Point Game by Boris Gloger is an excellent game to demonstrate the basics of scrum; this session is a twisted version of that game that allows you to show problems that you are facing and the impact on the team and delivering value.

An interactive session which will get you all moving about but will hopefully leave you feeling energised and ready to solve those issues

It started as a simple way to bring lightness and safety to a team’s scrum of scrums.

Shared learnings from my own journey as a leader and contributor within fiercely competitive teams.

Over time these lessons from the world of Dragon Boating became a regular feature with my teams and now I'll share them with you too!

From working smarter not harder, to developing a minimum viable habit and the power of compound interest. Come and learn how these honest and valuable lessons helped me power an awesome team & culture.

Boral is on a rapid Agile transformation and one of the challenges is to provide senior executives and the board of directors an understanding what agile really means for the company.

In the end its not about Scrum or Kanban, or any other framework for that matter.

They really just want to know what outcomes will it drive for the company.

We will explore the 9 factors that I've used to paint a picture of what an organisation would feel like if it truly became an agile organisation.

"Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart."

Has it ever crossed your mind to become a SCRUM Master?

Are you SCRUM Master starting your servant-leader journey?

Do you like stories?

Then this talk is for you! Step into the confessions of a Software Engineer turned SCRUM Master.

I was a Software Engineer for 7 years before I fell in love with Servant Leadership. My journey began with a great servant-leader & our Daily Stand up.

In this talk, I will share the story of my ongoing journey into servant leadership, the hurdles I encountered and the lessons & essential skills I have acquired along the way.

Let's explore the woes of being part of a team that strongly believed that they didn't need a SCRUM Master, the perils of becoming a servant-leader with a Software Engineer problem-solving mindset, and the joys of getting the team's buy-in on an idea.

Let's venture into the wonderful world of influencing people, knowing your team as individuals, and embracing what it means to be a servant-leader.

Imagine you are a Mad Agile Scientist and have a diabolical experiment to conduct - what would happen if you exchanged the brains of a Product Owner and Scrum Master? Mwuhahahaha!!! How would the body of a Product Owner with the brain of a Scrum Master act? And vice versa?

Perhaps the Scrum Master would now treat the team like a backlog? This Scrum Master would be focused on value and maintaining a coaching backlog of team and person improvements. This Scrum Master is refining the team, crafting a group that delivers value.

And perhaps the Product Owner might treat the backlog like a team? Rather than backlog refining, they coach the backlog. They would be focused on nurturing, protecting, and empowering the backlog. The backlog might transform from an irritation into a labor of love.

Although this experiment sounds terrible, this change of perspective might be what you need to reanimate your dead team or backlog.

Join the fun and come learn what horrifying results await!

Forming, or Launching, a new Agile Team is a critical step that is very often skipped due to lack of knowledge, time pressure or just eagerness to get on with work as soon as possible. This workshop discusses and demonstrates the importance of taking the time to launch teams and provides hand-on knowledge on how to Form a Team. This technique has been used by several organizations in the US and Australia. The last being the 2nd largest bank in Australia launching teams in an organization of 4500 people.

Do you like green eggs and ham?

As I read these bed time stories to my son, I can't help but notice the many lessons that Dr Seuss could be teaching Agilists.

We can get inspiration from our everyday activities, such as reading bed time stories and this presentation will explore 6 lessons to grow your agile mindset.

From the experimentation mindset to making people awesome, come and explore how these stories relate to growing our Agile mindset

The best storytelling might be the one that you experienced yourself.

Let me tell you the story of how a 500-employee company completely changed its structure, lead by the employees' impulse.
After 10 years and an average of 20% organic growth every year, it was time to change, for the organisation to keep growing.

Originally, the teams were composed of senior & highly skilled consultants, divided into 3 industry-focused departments.
But over time, consultants started feeling frustrated being stuck in one department, working in 1 industry, on the same types of missions.
The company turnover reached a peak and in 2014 the executive team decided to address the problem.
More than half of the employees gathered to answer the question: how should the organisation be organised, in order to fulfil both business and consultants needs?

This talk will be about how the company organised a bottom-up conversation to invent and to collectively design their very own great place to work.

More than the organisation model itself, the talk will emphasis on the collective design process of the organisation based on a clearly stated problem, on the core principles on which the Tribes lie on and on the benefits that have been observed after 3 years of operation.
Greatly inspired by the book "Tribal Leadership" by David Logan, the employees ended up organising themselves as Tribes of expertise.

Most transformations fail, a staggering amount! I once heard a figure that over 90% of transformations fail and I wouldn’t be surprised if that number is closer to 100%.

How many of us have watch companies start their agile journey only for a few months or years later they abandon it and fire all their scrum masters and coaches, regress and ironically years later start the cycle again often re-hire the very same scrum masters and agile coaches they fired in the first place! We are stuck in agile-groundhog-day!

Einstein said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results - perhaps the same could be said about us as we continue to jump on the latest in a very long line of failed agile transformations?

Worse, it would seem we creating our own demise.

Much like words, definitions change over time. You may have a definition well documented but how it's perceived is everything. As perception changes so too do definitions. The more we continue with these failing transformations and allow for poor implementation of scrum, etc and roles like the Scrum Master to be reduced to a "delivery manager" or worse a jira monkey, the more it is becoming the perception and norm.

Are we in a race to the bottom and we don't even know about it? "agile fatigue" is very real and even us practitioners cringe when we hear the words "tribes" and "squads" even "agile" at times! We dodge labels and do things by stealth but ultimately still fail in the end.

I am reminded of the (then) chief of army whilst I was at the Royal Military College who famously said, “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept” are we accepting this by allowing it to happen? By saying yes to a part in these large transformations? Is this our slow death by 1000 cuts? Have we created our own demise?

So I ask what is the future of being a Scrum Master and Agile Coach? Is there even a future? Do we need to radically change how we approach the adoption of agile?

Help me workshop how we might approach things differently and not allow ourselves be end up like taxi drivers vs UBER. Or perhaps we past the point of return? Perhaps there is a second wave beyond agile? A new agile?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Let's find out together!

Practices change across different complex domains (like software engineering, medicine, agriculture etc.) but the principles are universal. In this experiment, we take the guiding principles from an eclectic range of practices, including permaculture, Buddhism, medicine and science, and then apply them to our own work with Lean-Agile teams and organisations.

Cole Sear: I'm ready to tell you my secret now.

Dr. Malcolm Crowe: Okay.

Cole Sear: Come closer.

Cole Sear: I see User Stories. They don't know they're User Stories.

Dr. Malcolm Crowe: Where are they?

Cole Sear: Everywhere.

Cole Sear: i see people, they don't know they are User Stories

Dr. Malcolm Crowe: User Stories like, in organisations? In teams?

Cole Sear: Yes. Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're User Stories.

Dr. Malcolm Crowe: how often do you see them?

Cole Sear: all the time, they are everywhere, they only see what they want to see

Dr. Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them?

Cole Sear: All the time. They're everywhere.

In this session, I´d love to share with you how I´m using them. Everywhere. Every time. How I´m recognising them, even if they don´t know (yet) they are User Stories. And how I help them to become beautiful and useful tools for us to understand our context better and, from there, take better decisions and deliver greater value.

In this session, we´ll practice User Story identification and creation through several exercises closing with the eXtreme User Story Splitting Challenge. wish you enjoy this session and get some good take-aways from it. Meanwhile, I´ll appreciate your comments to my proposal to be able to tweak and improve it if required. Thanks

When I reflect on it, something which I hear way too often in corporate life but rarely heard in the army is the idea of accountability. We look for someone's head to be chopped off, why? Because we are planning for failure, planning for when things go wrong to know who to blame, who's head to cut off.

But what about if we flipped the narrative? What would it look like if we were to set the conditions for the team to succeed rather than fail? What if we started thinking with a success mindset? What would that look like?

During this talk I will share a few lessons I've learned on having a success mindset from the army. Some soft stuff, like what does the attributes, etc look like and then some more practical things you can start doing tomorrow to break free from the failure mindsets and culture.

What does Sir Francis Bacon's scientific method (1620) have to do with lean-agile? When was The Agile Manifesto written? What lean-agile stuff happened in Japan after WW2? What is "complexity" and why is it even a thing?

Sometimes, to know where we are, it helps to look at where we've been. Agile didn't just arrive fully formed, it's a dynamic process that is unfolding over time. People, thoughts and events have come together and gone off on trajectories. We're all part of that here today.

Whether you're a beginner or an expert, come along and contribute to this variation on the classic "Timeline" retrospective. There are no wrong answers. We'll learn from each other and build a chronological map of our field over time.